There’s little debate about what is the oldest profession in the world, so it’s a good bet that one of the oldest sayings in the world is “sex sells” and that has never been more true in the age of the internet.
I am not going to bother to dig up the statistics, many of us have read and heard that the first place big money was made on the internet was porn, and because of that, the people in porn had to blaze a trail in making internet transactions trustworthy, making it much easier for companies that were growing up (with fewer limitations on how grown up their customers were . . .) to offer secure transactions over the internet.
It looks like porn is at it again, but this time in a less obvious way.
The article in the paper this morning (here) was on the front page of The New York Times and I think that’s probably where it belonged. The key of the article is captured by this quote:
“On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. “We have to cater to that.”
Basically, the thrust of the article is that the porn industry is removing plots from their films because they don’t have time to do character development and storyline and still have time to deliver what their customer wants when the customer attention span is three to five minutes.
This is a big deal and it extends well beyond porn given how much internet usage is increasing across so many demographic segments. Given that people are already selling songs one at time, instead of full albums, and books like my book Rethink can be purchased electronically a chapter at a time, there are precedents for more bite-size demand from the consumer, but this lays out the requirement more explicitly than I have seen previously.
Newspapers and publishers now have to rethink what they need to cut out of their content en route to these three to five minute segments. This is the sad reality of the world we live in that print books and the printed Sunday New York Times are becoming less and less popular, but content creators and managers need to make the adjustment that porn has already made.
Hopefully they keep the story lines.
-Ric
He said it!